Antenna diversity is a wireless diversity scheme that uses two or more antennas with respective processing chains to improve the quality and reliability of a wireless link. This scheme may be accomplished in an advanced implementation by dynamically switching the processing chains on and off based on conditions such as radio frequency conditions.
Existing dynamic antenna diversity schemes do not take in consideration carrier aggregation, which is the use of more than one carrier to increase overall transmission bandwidth. Antenna selection could differ by carrier, yet in these existing solutions all carriers have a same antenna diversity setting. A result could be performance or power penalties when individual carriers have different preferred diversity settings. For example, if it is assumed that a first carrier A preferably uses two antennas, and a second carrier B preferably uses one antenna, the dynamic antenna diversity circuit selects for both carriers A and B either one or two antennas. If the antenna diversity circuit selects one antenna, the result is likely a performance degradation for Carrier A. Alternatively, if the antenna diversity circuit selects two antennas, the result is likely unnecessary power consumption by Carrier B because a second processing chain for the second antenna is on despite not being needed.